America's Mom

Life Before Father

Early in the evening of the Great Punch, I had attempted to ingratiate myself with the actress who had played so many ladies of breeding — in Lost Horizon, Gentleman’s Agreement and Task Force — with a clumsy complimenting. How good of her, I said, to retain the clear lilt of her New England accent, against what must have been the demands of the front office to dumb it down. She lasered a regal stare my way and said she was a New York City girl. (I can find endless ways of embarrassing myself in front of movie royalty.) Indeed, Jane was a Rensselaer, from the family that helped settle, and for a time owned, much of Manhattan.

After Chapin and Barnard, Jane went on the stage. She played one of the suspects in The Fatal Alibi, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (with Charles Laughton as Hercule Poirot). In Dinner at Eight she was the young belle having an affair with a roue. She did Philip Barry’s The Joyous Season, with Lillian Gish, and Clifford Odets’ Night Music, with the Group Theater gang, including Elia Kazan, who seven years later would direct Jane in Gentleman’s Agreement. In her gray-list period she co-starred in Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden with Fredric March and (yes, that) James Lipton. And, this is weird, in 1934 she graced a fantasy called Lost Horizons.

That was the year Hollywood called, and she got the ingenue role in James Whale’s One More River, from a John Galsworthy novel. She played the beautiful, snobbish Estella, in a low-budget version of Great Expectations (1934); a society girl trying to live on $150 a month in The Luckiest Girl in the World (1936); and, her big break, the woman who wants to shake Ronald Colman out of his Shangri-La reverie in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. Oddly, she didn’t make another movie for three years, returning in a low-budget drama for Republic called The Girl from God’s Country.

She knew that the good roles were of bad women, and was vexed that she didn’t get them. (Her good friend Claire Trevor, another well-bred Manhattan baby, won an Oscar for playing a floozy in Key Largo.) Jane was resigned to be the hero’s steadying hand — an earlier, more refined June Allyson — in a dozen more movies. The characters she played were so well-behaved that it’s a shock to see Wyatt gaze at Cary Grant, in the 1944 None But the Lonely Heart, with a flash of ardor. But her screen persona suggested a warmth, not a fire, and was more suited to the small screen. As she would soon learn.

Flag of Our Father

At the moment, Father Knows Best is not being shown on any of the 500 or so channels carried on my Time Warner cable system. (I relied for this story on some old tapes I’d made, and on the very helpful TV.com website.) But in the six years FKB was on the air, in 203 episodes, from Oct. 3, 1954 to May 23, 1960, it set both the standard and the stereotype for the good-natured family sitcom.